By Gerald D. Klee, MD
[Winter 2006; Vol. 33, No. 1; Pg 7, 11-12]
Before
starting psychiatric training I served for a year at the US Medical Center for
Federal Prisoners, providing general medical care to the prisoners and
experiencing many things that can’t be learned from a book. The medical center
was (and still is) a 1000 bed facility that accepted male patients from federal
prisons all over the US. A large proportion of patients were diagnosed with
mental disorders and many others were diagnosed with sexual deviations of
various kinds. At that time, homosexuality was officially considered a sexual
deviation. Since the presence of overtly homosexual inmates was considered a
disruptive factor in most prisons, the medical center had a far larger
percentage of such inmates than any other place.
The
prison riot took place one night when I was “Officer of the Day” (OD). The
title applied to the sole physician who was on duty at the hospital overnight.
That means I was the only MD covering a 1000 bed hospital, and I had little
experience.
Close
to midnight, as I was half dozing over Krafft-Ebbing’s famous “Psychopathia
Sexualis”, the phone rang, shattering the silence of the OD room. I picked it
up and heard the voice of the lieutenant of the guard. “Doc, there’s a riot
in cell block three. Get over here right away.” Thus began an adventure in my
early medical career that taught me some things about desperate men and about
myself.
I
dropped the book and hurried towards the riot. It was a long way getting there
and involved passing through lengthy corridors, unlocking multiple security
gates and relocking them behind me. Along the way, I stopped for a moment. “A
riot”, I said to myself, “why should I, a doctor, be in such a hurry to get
to a riot?”
I
then proceeded at a more sensible pace. When I arrived, I found most of the
inmates locked behind the gates of the cell block, screaming in rage as they
rattled the bars. The lieutenant stood in a foyer outside the bars, accompanied
by several other guards. An inmate, a handsome, but delicate fellow, about 20
years old, lay on the floor outside the bars and near the guards. I’ll call
him “Floyd”. He was bleeding from a wound in his neck. I had no idea what
had happened, but this called for immediate action rather than talk.
I
knelt down and examined him as the guards watched and the other prisoners
screamed. He was in pain, but his vital signs were normal. On the left side of
his neck there was a ragged wound, less than an inch long, from which blood was
trickling. It was not far from the jugular vein and the carotid artery. In that
region, it could have been fatal. It looked like he had been stabbed with a
crude instrument of the kind that prisoners constantly fashioned from scraps of
metal, such as bed springs or pieces of metal trays from the dining hall.
As
I dabbed at the wound with a cotton sponge, blood spurted all over me and my
white coat. An artery must have been cut after all! I was afraid it was the
carotid. As it turned out, it was a minor artery, but it gave me quite a scare.
Somehow I quickly succeeded in stopping the bleeding and got him stabilized. I
can remember most of the other details of that night pretty clearly, but I wish
I could remember what I did to stop the bleeding. (Floyd subsequently made an
uneventful recovery on the medical ward under my care.)
After
I attended to Floyd, the inmates continued screaming bloody murder and trying to
break down the bars. I still hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened and
what was going on. This cell block contained many of the most violent and
mentally disturbed patients in the prison. Many had committed homicide and most
of them looked and sounded homicidal that night.
The
lieutenant was a seasoned veteran of the prison and was the senior man in charge
of the guards that night. He made the following announcement to me. Gesturing
toward the cell block full of loud and potentially homicidal inmates, he said,
“Doc, we’re going in there.”
I
imagined us being torn apart by this howling mob and I tried not to show how
scared I was. I was terrified of going in among them, but I discovered I was
even more afraid of being labeled a coward. I was pretty new there, and I would
never live it down with either the guards or the inmates.
I quickly reasoned
that the lieutenant knew more than I about the prisoners and about what was
going on that night. I had to trust him. Surely, he didn’t want to be torn
apart any more than I did. I was quaking inside as we entered the cell block.
Once
we were in with the prisoners it became clear that we weren’t the targets of
their rage. They gathered about us and described what had happened. It
seems that Floyd was the favorite love object of the sex starved prisoners. They
competed for his affection. As is usual in these circumstances, the most
powerful and dangerous men got most of Floyd’s attentions. The two most
dominant men, Baker and Fuller, competed with each other to monopolize Floyd.
That night, Fuller caught Floyd with Baker, and in a fit of jealous rage,
stabbed Floyd. There was an immediate uproar. Floyd was everyone’s darling and
the mob wanted to kill Fuller.
I
learned that the inmates had been trying to break out in order to get at Fuller.
When I was attending to Floyd’s wound I hadn’t noticed Fuller, who had been
skulking in a corner of the foyer. The other inmates knew where he was and he
wouldn’t have lasted long if they got at him.
I couldn’t imagine
how the guards on duty had been able to extract Fuller and his victim Floyd from
the cell block without letting the other inmates out. It still seems like a
miracle.
In
1946, while in Rome, Italy, I saw a performance of “Pagliacci”, in a small
neighborhood opera house. In this drama, Canio stabs and kills his wife Nedda
out of jealousy when he discovers that she has a lover. The local audience knew
this story by heart and reacted with shouts and boos to every nuance. Unlike the
usually subdued American opera audiences, they were part of the show.
The noise of the
prison rioters reminded me of the yelling of the opera audience. I had thought
things like that happened only in the theater, but on that night at the medical
center I was reminded that theater imitates life.